Thursday, May 1, 2008

Ron Fair Spins His House on to the Market

SELLER: Ron FairLOCATION: Lime Orchard Road, Beverly Hills (PO), CAPRICE: $4,795,000SIZE: 3,977 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4.25 bathroomsDESCRIPTION: Recently completed and exceptionally finished contemporary home features a full-floor, upstairs master suite comprised of dual walk-in closets, a designer-chic bathroom and a spacious sitting room/office area. Plentiful French doors and sliding walls of glass bathe the house in light. Tree and ridge-top views from the private and serene pool area. Outdoor dining, a grassy side-yard/play area, and an additional, not-yet developed portion of land across the street round out this rare offering.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: He may not be a household name, but more than likely most folks are familiar with some of the music Ron Fair has written and/or produced, and we guarantee that even the most vehemently indie of the children are somewhat and/or superficially acquainted with a few of the females he's mentored and transformed into singing super stars. Mister Fair is widely understood to be at least partly responsible for funneling and channeling the early careers of ladees like Christina Aguilera, Mya, Mary J. Blige, Macy Grey, The Pussycat Dolls, Keyshia Cole and as the president/chairman of Geffen Records, he's the slim hipped and bespectacled music mogul who worked with Ashlee Simpson on her most recent and not entirely well received third album, a slickly produced pop music flash back that Your Mama can assure you we will go out of our way not to listen to.

Regardless of what you think of the particular genre of pop music he's responsible for producing and pushing, Mister Fair is clearly very good at what he does and has earned himself a healthy and respectable living as is evidenced by the contemporary crib in the Bev Hills that he recently foisted on to the market with a $4,795,000 asking price.

Although we are non-plussed by the somewhat ster-rile and uncomfortable looking living and dining room day-core and we find the fireplace design a little, uh, much, generally speaking this is a house we can get behind. We are feelin' appreciative of the generous glazing and the ease with which the main rooms open wide to the exterior, we are happy to see the sterility issue resolved in the den/office, and really, let's be honest, there's nothing here that can't be fixed with a nice gay decorator who knows a thing or two about injecting color into a room without making it looking like a damn fun house.

Your Mama is rarely a fan of the kitchen pass through, so we're certainly not grooving on the stove hood peeping through the pass through to the dining room, but we do like the size of the kitchen, the sky light works well for ambient sunshine, and we like stools where dinner guests can sidle up and sip gin and tonics while Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter whip up some Chinese food.

Although we can imagine not all couples with kids will find it desirable, Your Mama is one hundred percent in support of the second floor being devoted entirely to the master bedroom... puts the over night guests like Sister Woman's rather loud children at a comfortable night time distance. The fireplace in the master could be nice for cool or romantic evening, that is of course if we could persuade our house gurlSvetlana to haul a load of wood up to the second floor, which Your Mama is pretty sure we could not. We could certainly live with it, but again, the fireplace design in the master bedroom is just a bit too too for our personal taste and we're definitely not digging the flat screen television anchored above the fireplace even though it's probably perfect for the porn passionistas among us.

The petite and private backyard is also tugging our love strings as it's just enough space for a wonderfully simple shaped swimming pool and a wee terrace for the umbrella shaded chaise lounges, but not nearly large enough for all th at visually upsetting climbing and sliding apparati that people with children too often clutter up their backyards with. "Take 'em to the park or the beach if they want to dig in some sand," is what' we're sayin'.

Listen kids, Your Mama thinks this might be an opportunity for one of you well-to-do children to live up in a guard gated neighborhood bulging and bursting at the seams with rich and famous Hollywood types. Up the road from Mister Fair is former President and CEO of Lifetime Entertainment Carole Black. Down the road and around the corner we've got former Viacom head honcho Tom Freston (who happens to be selling his townhouse in NYC) and a little further along is fast fading singer/ack-tress/tabloid queen Jessica Simpson, who shacks up next door to bling queen Kimora Lee Simmons about whose krazy dee-luxe ways are in constant awe. Also in the 'hood is producer and mega music manager Guy Oseary and up the hill is the sprawling and modern residence of recently deceased gun lover Charleton Heston. And that's not even counting the other ridiculously rich neighborhood residents like financier Richard Ressler who owns a multi-parcel estate on Lime Orchard Road or the politically well-connected couple who recently purchased producer Andrew Vanja's in need of a nice gay decorator estate for $6,300,000.

So listen children, y'all can gripe and snipe all you want about how this house in the Post Office and not the City of Bev Hills and you can scoff 'til the cows come home about the sorry state of the guard house at the bottom of Lime Orchard Road, but this neck of the hills is crawling with celebs who can afford to live anywhere in LA, so it just cain't be all that bad.

We understand the Mister Fair has a small child now and as such Your Mama presumes that he and his baby momma will be moving to more child friendly digs where they can fill the back yard with slides, sand boxes and jungle gyms like all the other rich mommies and daddies. C'est la vie.

43 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Someone has a thing about horizontal lines. Both fireplaces and all the kitchen cabinets. Can't tell for sure but looks kind of like the wallpaper/covering in the office is some sort of horizonal pattern. I'd get rid of it on the fireplaces and leave the kitchen.

I agree with Mama about the stove hood. Easily fixed, I'd just put a panel of opaque glass from the bottom edge of the hood up to the ceiling.

The only other thing that I don't care for is the round bathroom vanity.

I've never liked this 80s-90s Hollywood Hills Modern look -- it looks like the sort of place where Steve Sanders parks the Corvette. That said, this one is a better example.

Not really feeling Ashlee Simpson's new record, either, but I have been amused by the Missing Persons lite flavor of "Out of My Head (Ay Ya Ya)" -- she's doing her best to channel Dale Bozzio, and even though she misses the mark, I love her for trying.

Nothing to see or care. A loser who got blackballed and who hasn't worked in 7-8 years, trying to get by hawking self help books (but didn't help himself?) living above his means walked away from a house in the valley. Probably did it as a PR stunt. Worked to get your attention Average Ho.

I've seen this house and it is a terrific contemporary. Great location (very private). The Master is really something; agree with Mama on this one... an entire floor of master is heaven. This is a thumbs up property.

y all y all need to stop, stop, illegally downloading music, or buying it from itunes, you need to start buying cd's again for 19.95, your actions have caused a lot of producers to go homeless and you are now starting to bankrupt the record executives as well.

here is the math

before 1999 a superstar sold 12MM records, today they sell 3MM, average artist in 1999 sold 3MM for their debut, today they sell 500k if they are lucky.

before 1999 a record label would make 8$ for every record sold, today they make 4$.

Sales are down 80% from 1999, itunes and napster killed the music industry.

watch in the next 2 years, you will be lucky to hear new artists, and it will be your fault as the public.

what a shame

in a few years there will be no talent hacks putting out their music on itunes by the millions, because you the public have bankrupted the once powerful very organized music industry that once brought many talented stars to the masses.

now that the labels are going out of business, who will develop and nurture the artists as myself ?, who will pay for acting lessons, dancing lessons, singing lessons, clothes, assistants, personell ?

I can see now that this is a bad time to be an artist and a bad time to try and sell a home.

then again the world is supposed to end on Dec 21 2012 when it wobbles for a few days, from the suns gravity, so I guess it all does not matter anyway.

Hmmmm...the world is ending on December 21st, 2012....Now where did I just read that this week? Let me think...Oh yeah, AVERAGE IDIOT posted that same thing in the comments on the Prince/Beverly Park story.

With humanity coming up fast on 2012, publishers are helping readers gear up and count down to this mysterious — some even call it apocalyptic — date that ancient Mayan societies were anticipating thousands of years ago.Since November, at least three new books on 2012 have arrived in mainstream bookstores. A fourth is due this fall. Each arrives in the wake of the 2006 success of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which has been selling thousands of copies a month since its release in May and counts more than 40,000 in print. The books also build on popular interest in the Maya, fueled in part by Mel Gibson's December 2006 film about Mayan civilization, Apocalpyto.

Authors disagree about what humankind should expect on Dec. 21, 2012, when the Maya's "Long Count" calendar marks the end of a 5,126-year era.

Journalist Lawrence Joseph forecasts widespread catastrophe in Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation Into Civilization's End. Spiritual healer Andrew Smith predicts a restoration of a "true balance between Divine Feminine and Masculine" in The Revolution of 2012: Vol. 1, The Preparation. In 2012, Daniel Pinchbeck anticipates a "change in the nature of consciousness," assisted by indigenous insights and psychedelic drug use.

The buildup to 2012 echoes excitement and fear expressed on the eve of the new millennium, popularly known as Y2K, though on a smaller scale, says Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor at Publishers Weekly. She says publishers seem to be courting readers who believe humanity is creating its own ecological disasters and desperately needs ancient indigenous wisdom.

"The convergence I see here is the apocalyptic expectations, if you will, along with the fact that the environment is in the front of many people's minds these days," Garrett says. "Part of the appeal of these earth religions is that notion that we need to reconnect with the Earth in order to save ourselves."

But scholars are bristling at attempts to link the ancient Maya with trends in contemporary spirituality. Maya civilization, known for advanced writing, mathematics and astronomy, flourished for centuries in Mesoamerica, especially between A.D. 300 and 900. Its Long Count calendar, which was discontinued under Spanish colonization, tracks more than 5,000 years, then resets at year zero.

"For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle," says Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Fla. To render Dec. 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting, she says, is "a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in."

Part of the 2012 mystique stems from the stars. On the winter solstice in 2012, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years. This means that "whatever energy typically streams to Earth from the center of the Milky Way will indeed be disrupted on 12/21/12 at 11:11 p.m. Universal Time," Joseph writes.

But scholars doubt the ancient Maya extrapolated great meaning from anticipating the alignment — if they were even aware of what the configuration would be.

Astronomers generally agree that "it would be impossible the Maya themselves would have known that," says Susan Milbrath, a Maya archaeoastronomer and a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History. What's more, she says, "we have no record or knowledge that they would think the world would come to an end at that point."

University of Florida anthropologist Susan Gillespie says the 2012 phenomenon comes "from media and from other people making use of the Maya past to fulfill agendas that are really their own."

However, I don't think everything since the 90s has been crap. Still a lot of good stuff. If you think it's shit you're probably stuck in the past and you're not in the target market anyway.

I don't really like any of the artists that Mama links to Ron Fair here. But I think the Pussycat Dolls is a well thought out concept and well put together. They're welcome to do their little dance at my place anyday.

For whatever reason (probably because we react), "Diz" as he has now posted as, is always preaching to the wrong choir. I am starting to long for the day when Mama's show goes on the air and the network moves this blog to their website with a moderator that will send "Diz" back where he belongs.

Being an only child, I've always had a hard time grasping sibling dynamics. Whenever I'd visit a friend who had a ton of brothers and sisters, I'd never get why one of them was always smacked upside the head and told to shut up. Being a sensitive child, I'd take pity on the poor wretch and think, "Awww...that's not fair! They should be nicer."

Having insomnia last night I wandered to my computer at 2am to read through some posts and hopefully come away with a smile when I went back to bed. Instead, thanks to a few (or maybe just one average kind of fella), I came away wanting to scream, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"

It's like water torture. Drip. Drip. Drip.

And if Mister Fair and his beloved have a tot, how to they keep it from pulling down those potted plants? My little precious one would have been "gardening" in the living room long ago.

that attitude is why in a few years there will be no more future, rolling stones, michael jackson, 50 cent, backstreet boys, britney spears, and will be all your fault.

labels in the last year have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing money, they are down to a 10th of what they once were on staff, an exec said that they are in a blackhole and there is no end in sight.

I guess the dream is truly gone thanks to you, the public.

Well thank god I am young enough to take up acting, I am only 18.

M OUT !!!!!

PEACE, ONE AND ALL DAT S****

DIZ WHO WAZ IN DA F**** MUSIC BIZ.

AND NOW I AM GOING TO GET INTO DA ACTIZ BIZ !!!!

THEN MAYBE I WILL BE FAMOUS ENOUGH TO LIVE THE DREAM AND BUY A 10MM estate or 2.

a) If you are really only 18, that explains all your idiotic posts under all your idiotic names. My guess is the extent of your speaking into a mic will be to ask "Would you like fries?"

b) Bands like the Rolling Stones will always be around. Michael Jackson f*cked up his own life. The other artists you list would have been one hit wonders at best without the label spending millions to give an appearance that they had talent. Their "talent" is a fabrication of recording engineers.

c) Labels are in the sh*tter for far more reasons than I will take up Mama's time and space to list. There are blogs for that. Go find one.

I am a former investor in the music business and to see tens of millions of my money go into artists for marketing, airplay and to see just a 10% return vs 200% return 10 years ago ? that is just hog wash.

I am in real estate and movies now.

You are right diz, find another career, the music business is dead, all you have now are the leftovers.

hey tex, if you were really getting 200 percent return on your music investments then i have no problems with the implosion of corporate music scene which clearly has nothing to do with talent of good music and everything to do with the money being made by investors with no concern for music.

sounds to me like greed killed the music business not teenagers downloading music.

Anon 3:21, very valid point. And in my opinion very much a part of the problem. The labels are run by accountants, not industry veterans. Artist contracts leave the artists with little or no money from the actual cd. They only make money if they go out on the road. Too many of the "new artists" (less than talented studio creations) on the rosters at the labels aren't sucessful on tour because they can't recreate the studio magic live.

In time the labels as we know them will only exist to manage catalogues of music they already have the rights to. Artists will release their music digitally and/or do their own cds and distribute through online sources like CDBaby.

Mama; Sorry about your tech problems. The metastatic drivel showing up here in your absence makes me miss your information and wit even more. It seems that when you are driving the trip is much more enjoyable. Get well soon!

stpaulsnowman,If only the metastatic drivel were that infrequent. To bring you up to speed, it's just one commenter responding back himself via his other names.

This apparently fills his need. His content is of no interest or relevance, he barely understands it himself. Usually he's manafesting on something he saw on tv or read on his sky is falling blogs. His core personality is Avreage Joe, but has about 10 aliases. His degree of intensity is usually tied to the combinaions of drugs in his system inspiring the moment.

Apparently today's reactive attachment mood is a music business topic. He never has first hand experience, instead, it's a lot if paraphrasing from other places.

Dear Anlny12:03. Now that's both interesting and scary. How are you seeing through all the anonymous and other "handles" to integrate this person? Are you out there Clarice Starling! I had to use the anonymous label yesterday to cheer for the Newport mansions simply because I couldn't remember the password I had chosen, but to sculpt a whole irrelevant thread is straight out of Miltown!

StPaulSnowman, I second that "average joe" and his/her various nicknames is very easy to spot once you have been reading the blog for some time. The most obvious is when "he" replies with an "I was writing about..." but uses a different nickname than the first post. He/she doesn't make any effort to hide or change writing style because the point of being a troll is the attention and recognition.

Stick around for a while and you will start recognizing the posts too.

I like this house. The kitchen pass-through can be closed up. It could be I like this house because the owner has bookshelves and what appears to be a well-used office. Don't care for many of the musical acts he produces, but what does that have to do with the sale of the house?